The biggest difference between the world of science and everyday life in protecting against erroneous beliefs is that scientists utilize a set of formal procedures to guard against the sources of bias and error discussed in this book—a set of procedures of which the average person is insufficiently aware, and has not adequately adopted in daily life. Scientists employ relatively simple statistical tools to guard against the misperception of random sequences discussed in Chapter 2. They utilize control groups and random sampling to avoid drawing inferences from incomplete and unrepresentative
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